Further to the last post on puns in the world of large London towers I present this beauty from Property Week. Commenting on the Shard tower poking further up into London, and on Simon Jenkins making an even bigger tit of himself than usual, this wonderful headline emerged;

In keeping with the habit of architects to give their buildings stupid names, see Darth Vaders Helmet, the moderately sensible Leadenhall Tower acquired the nickname The Cheesegrater. Some may say calling a building ‘The Cheesegrater’ purely on the basis of one of the sides being slightly sloped is a bit weak, and some may well be right, but these are architects we’re talking about; by their standards that is Oscar Wilde on the form of his life.

This has proved an irresistible target for newspaper sub-editors, alas some of them haven’t quite got the hang of it;

Honestly I’m not even sure what the Evening Standard was trying to do there, of course I can see the ‘Grater/Greater Good’ part, but damned if I know what that has to do with the rest of the headline. Frankly they should take a hard look at themselves, then go and read the Financial Times for proper cheese grating based puns;

Which works perfectly for a story about how the Irish government is using EU social cohesion funding to distribute free cheese. Though be warned, merely being Irish and cheese based makes a pun work, see this horror in the same article;

opposition party Fine Gael’s agriculture spokesman Andrew Doyle said in a statement: “People on the breadline would rather the government’s ‘un-feta’d’ attention was on solving the economic crisis.”

Dear. Lord. No. I fear Mr Doyle used to work for the Evening Standard….

The latest exciting skyscraper/big building in London to return from recession induced delay is Walbrook Square, four moderately tall buildings with large green houses on top and some grass. However if you really squint (and have only second hand descriptions of the films to go on) you might conclude it looks like Darth Vaders helmet;

No it really isn't Darth Vader's Helmet. Trust me on this.

Given that the critics of the scheme were mainly architects, and they’re the ones who came up with the Darth Vader’s helmet tag, we can reasonably conclude that almost no-one in that profession has actually seen the films. They probably weren’t pretentiously art house enough for them, in my experience architects generally prefer 5hr long films in subtitled French about the existential bleakness of a cold baguette.

Anyway the nickname stuck, despite being almost entirely incorrect, due to the lure of the headlines. Whenever the project was going well there was a ‘Force is strong‘ type headline, whenever it was delayed it was a ‘Powers are weak’ based one. Thankfully it’s now going ahead so they might shut up, however I fear there may be ‘Now I am the master’ type headlines when the rents are announced and it shoots to the top of the ‘price per m²’ rankings. It’s just a cross I will have to bear I suppose.

Extra bonus fact; the basement of the development will contain a restored temple to Mithra, the ancient Persian/Roman god who is basically Jesus a completely different deity from Jesus. Except for a few coincidences like the same birthday. And the whole virgin birth thing. And an identical death, 3 day wait and resurrection. And the baptism and other similar ceremonies. And they did both have 12 disciples. But apart from those a few hundred other trifling similarities they are completely different, and if you say otherwise the Pope will be very upset.